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I recently watched the movie “Dangerous minds” where Michelle Pfeiffer is a teacher to a
group of high school learners who are bussed from poor communities into a privileged
affluent school far from their own communities. As a teacher in a similar
context, the movie left me thinking about my teaching experience thus far.
One of the greatest
lessons I’ve learned in my teaching experience thus far has been the danger of
assumptions. When I met my learners in January I made assumptions about them
based on the behaviour I observed, how they expressed themselves in the
classroom and how they applied themselves to the work I gave them. Observing my
learners (especially when they are not looking or when they think there are no
beady adult eyes around them) means that I make meaning of their behaviour
based on what I know about being a teenager in 2012 and the kind of
relationship I should have with my learners when they walk into my classroom
everyday. If my children were book covers, man…

I recently watched the play “Waiting
for the Barbarians” based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting
for the Babarians. Coetzee’s writing has often left me unsettled and
disturbed therefore I didn’t watch the play as a fan of his work, but rather as
a critic to see if the play would have the same effect on me as his books.
The story is about “the empire”— that does not have a definite
geographical location in the novel—
waiting for barbarians who are on the verge of attacking the last
outpost. The relationship between the barbarians and the empire can be extended
to current day South Africa where the question of safety, security and the need
to identify who the real enemy is when we live in violent society such as ours.
The story requires readers (and the audience who watch the play) to contemplate
and question their idea of who are the real barbarians when we are in a context
where the president is associated with the words “mshini wami” (give me my
machine gun) or words “shoot to kil…